Yes, cultural aspects can weigh into this. Funnily enough, most Bitcoin Core contributors would prefer if Bitcoin were only used for monetary transactions.

I think where the main disconnect lies is that there are more goals beyond just preventing data transactions. Mining decentralization, censorship resistance, and having a flexible scripting system are also important aspects of the Bitcoin system, and many Bitcoin Core contributors expect that the arms race of trying to prevent data transactions will take too much time from other important work.

Finally, monetary transactions alone have not been providing enough blockspace demand to keep blocks full, but have still been too expensive for many uses at the same time. It seems to me that overall we still need to find more scalability improvements, especially for small payments. I don’t think the network would thrive in the long run if we were to shrink-freeze consensus rules on the status quo just to combat monkey pictures.